A Noisy-Channel Account of Crosslinguistic Word-Order Variation

Gibson, Edward; Piantadosi, Steven T.; Brink, Kimberly A.; Bergen, Leon; Lim, Eunice Ying Ci; Saxe, Rebecca

doi:10.1177/0956797612463705

Cited by 165 publications

(242 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Hence, English, Japanese and Korean speakers generally shifted word order more often than Basque speakers because word order is a significantly less reliable processing cue in Basque than in the other languages. This approach is AIMING AT SHORTER DEPENDENCIES 27 also broadly compatible with information-theoretic and inference-based accounts that link production preferences to efficient communication (Gibson et al, 2013;Jaeger, 2010; for further discussion and references see Jaeger & Tilly, 2011).…”

Section: The Competition Model: a Trade-off Between Processing Facilimentioning

confidence: 80%

“…Furthermore, the Noisy-Channel account (Gibson et al, 2013) may explain why Basque speakers sometimes produced SVO utterances. According to this account, SVO arises as a result of communicative pressures, due to users' sensitivity to the possibility of noise corrupting the linguistic signal.…”

Section: Why Verb-medial Responses?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the last decades, linguistics has come to accept that processing constraints play a role in word order preferences (Chomsky, 1995;Dryer, 1980Dryer, , 1992Hawkins, 1983Hawkins, , 1994Wasow, 2002), thus converging with psycholinguistic models that have tackled the question of how processing demands impact on sentence word order variations (Arnold, Wasow, Asudeh, & Alrega, 2004;Bock, 1982;Bock & Levelt, 1994;Bresnan, Cueni, Nikitina, & Baayen, 2007;Ferreira & Dell, 2000;Gibson, 1998; among others), including accounts based on information theoretic considerations (Gibson, Piantadosi, Brink, Bergen, Lim, & Saxe, 2013;Maurits, Perfors, & Navarro, 2010, inter alia). Thus, there is general agreement that sentence word order is modulated by factors external to the grammar, although there are differing views on the specifics of this interaction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

Ros

Santesteban

Fukumura

et al. 2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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This study examined word order preferences as a function of phrasal length in Basque. Basque is an OV-language with flexible sentence word order and rich verb agreement. Contrary to the universal short-before-long preference predicted by availability models, Hawkins has argued that short-before-long orders are preferred in VO-languages such as English, whereas long-beforeshort orders are preferred in OV-languages such as Japanese (Hawkins, 2004). However, it is unclear how length affects word order preferences when an OV-language has rich verb agreement and allows postverbal arguments. We found a general long-before-short preference, and a tendency to place the verb in a sentence-medial position when one constituent is long. We argue that since agreement morphology signals the thematic role and case of surrounding phrases, it contributes to speeding up sentence processing. We conclude that morphologically rich languages employ both general adjacency mechanisms and language-specific resources to enhance language efficiency.

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Section: The Competition Model: a Trade-off Between Processing Facilimentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: Why Verb-medial Responses?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

Ros

Santesteban

Fukumura

et al. 2015

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…A very different theoretical approach to the processing of disfluencies can be developed from recent work that describes language comprehension as the transmission of a linguistic signal across a noisy channel Gibson, Piantadosi, Brink, Bergen, Lim, & Saxe, 2013). "Noise" in a Noisy-Channel framework refers to any of the distortions inherent to natural language that might affect the comprehender's ability to process it, such as typos and poor handwriting in the domain of written language, or background noise, nonnative speech, and producer errors in the domain of spoken language.…”

Section: Bayesian/noisy Channel Models Of Language Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prediction in the Processing of Repair Disfluencies

2016

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Imagine a speaker who says "Turn left, uh I mean…" Before hearing the repair, the listener is likely to anticipate the word "right" based on the context, including the reparandum "left." Thus, even though the reparandum is not intended as part of the utterance, the listener uses it as information to predict the repair. The issue we explore in this article is how prediction operates in disfluency contexts. We begin by describing the Overlay model of disfluency comprehension, which assumes that the listener identifies a reparandum as such only after a repair is encountered which creates a local ungrammaticality. The Overlay model also allows the reparandum to influence subsequent processing, because the reparandum is not deleted from the final representation of the sentence. A somewhat different model can be developed which assumes a more active, anticipatory process for resolving repair disfluencies. On this model, the listener might predict the likely repair when the speaker becomes disfluent, or even identify a reparandum if the word or word string seems inconsistent with the speaker's intention. Our proposal is that the prediction can be made using the same mechanism involved in the processing of contrast, in which a listener uses contrastive prominence to generate likely alternates (the contrast set). We suggest that these two approaches to disfluency processing are not inconsistent: Successful repair processing requires listeners to use statistical and linguistic evidence to identify a reparandum and to integrate the repair, and the lingering of the reparandum is due to the coexistence in working memory of the reparandum, the repair, and unselected members of the contrast set.A central goal of psycholinguistics is to understand the cognitive mechanisms that enable us to process and comprehend spoken utterances. Pursuit of this goal has traditionally involved presenting listeners with language that has been scripted to be perfectly fluent and error-free, much like what one would expect to hear in a well-rehearsed speech or to read in a carefully proofread text. However, spontaneous speech is far from perfect. Common disfluencies in everyday language include filled pauses (e.g., uh, um), repetitions (e.g., Turn, Turn left), and repairs (e.g., Turn left, uh I mean right). Although several lines of work have shown that listeners' processing and interpretation of language are influenced by disfluencies (e.g.,

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“…Hall et al 2013). Importantly, all the major studies in this line of research rely on a seated design that keeps the participants stationary and prevents them from using their whole bodies (Goldin-Meadow et al 2008;Meir et al 2010;Gibson et al 2013;Hall et al 2013); in effect, the type of communication studied there is impromptu manual communication (see below ''silent gesture'').…”

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confidence: 99%

Defining Pantomime for Language Evolution Research

Żywiczyński

Wacewicz

Sibierska

2016

Topoi

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Although pantomimic scenarios recur in the most important historical as well as current accounts of language origins, a serious problem is the lack of a commonly accepted definition of ''pantomime''. We scrutinise several areas of study, from theatre studies to semiotics to primatology, pointing to the differences in use that may give rise to misunderstandings, and working towards a set of definitional criteria of ''pantomime'' specifically useful for language evolution research. We arrive at a definition of pantomime as a communication mode that is mimetic; non-conventional and motivated; multimodal (primarily visual); improvised; using the whole body rather than exclusively manual; holistic; communicatively complex and self-sufficient; semantically complex; displaced, openended and universal. So conceived, ''pantomime'' is a near synonym of ''bodily-mimetic communication'' as envisaged by Donald and Zlatev. On a wider plane, our work may help organise some of the terminology and discussion in language evolution, e.g. by drawing a clear distinction between gestural and pantomimic scenarios or by specifying the relation between pantomimic and multimodal scenarios.

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A Noisy-Channel Account of Crosslinguistic Word-Order Variation

Cited by 165 publications

References 33 publications

Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

Prediction in the Processing of Repair Disfluencies

Defining Pantomime for Language Evolution Research

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